Mary King's Close

The close is named after a real woman. Mary King was a textile merchant who, by 1635, appears in Edinburgh's records as a burgess and property holder with full voting rights, a rare status for a woman in the 1630s. She owned several of the properties in the narrow lane that runs steeply downhill from the High Street, and her name stuck to it. Like every close in the Old Town it was crowded, tall and unsanitary, with families stacked storey upon storey and the gutter doing duty as a drain.

In 1645 Edinburgh suffered the worst plague outbreak in its history, and the closes, with their packed tenements, suffered worst of all. It is here that legend and record part company. The story that the town council sealed Mary King's Close with some 600 inhabitants left inside to die has been repeated for generations, but historians have found no contemporary evidence for it. The records instead show a council managing the outbreak with surprising care: families well enough to be moved were taken out to the Burgh Muir, and households that could not be moved hung white flags from their windows so that food and coal could be delivered to their doors. The plague doctor George Rae worked the closes in head-to-toe leather and a beaked mask, and lived to tell the tale.

In 1753 work began on the Royal Exchange, designed by John Adam, and the upper storeys of the close were demolished so that the new building could be founded on the lower ones. The street went underground. People kept living and working in parts of it for another century and a half; the last resident, Andrew Chesney, was made to leave in 1902. The buried lanes were finally opened as a visitor attraction in 2003.

Mary King's Close has been haunted in the public imagination for more than three centuries, but the modern era of reports begins with Aiko Gibo's visit in 1992. Her account of Annie, and her gift of a tartan Barbie, did more than anything else to make the close famous, and the doll itself became a small celebrity. When it went missing from the room, the attraction issued a public appeal for its return, which was reported in the Edinburgh press.

Since the close opened to the public in 2003, the reports have been steady and mostly modest: cold spots in Annie's Room, a worried figure glimpsed at the end of a lane, the feeling of being watched in Mr Chesney's house, and the scratching from the chimney. Paranormal groups including The Ghost Club have investigated, and the attraction's own staff have run EVP and Echovox sessions in Chesney's house over roughly ten years, producing the "Just get out!" recording that circulates online. The close has featured in a number of television programmes on haunted Britain over the years.

The sceptical case is straightforward and the attraction itself makes it: the sealing-up of the close never happened, Annie has no documentary existence, and a low-lit underground street with a plague room and a heap of dolls is about as suggestive an environment as it is possible to build. What is not in dispute is the extraordinary survival of the street itself, and that is reason enough to go.

The Real Mary King's Close is entered from the Royal Mile, beneath the City Chambers, in the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town. The standard tour lasts about an hour and is led by a costumed guide playing a historical resident of the close; it is theatrical but well researched, and covers the plague, Mary King herself, Annie's Room and Mr Chesney's house. Tours run year round and sell out in summer and around Halloween, so book ahead and check the website for current times. Special evening and seasonal tours are usually added in October.

Because it is a genuine 17th-century close, the route involves steep, uneven steps and low ceilings, and it is not suited to wheelchairs or pushchairs; there are no toilets underground. Everything else you need is on the Royal Mile above. There is no accommodation in the close itself, but the Old Town has hotels and apartments within a minute's walk, and Waverley station is five minutes away.